1 / 1

The member of the RA NA delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Hasmik Hakobyan gave a speech at the 145^th IPU Assembly

“ Dear colleagues,

I represent the Republic of Armenia, which is small in area, but has given the world such outstanding people, as Charles Aznavour, William Saroyan, the first female diplomat in the world Diana Abgar and others.

One of the priorities in Armenia is the importance ofequality between women and men in public life.

In the Armenian parliament 38 out of the 103 deputies are women. However, today I will not touch upon this issue in details.

I shall talk about the role of the Armenian woman in the battlefield.

On September 13, Azerbaijan unleashed a new aggression against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Armenia, which was accompanied by war crimes, cases of intentional targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure, gross violations of international and humanitarian law.

There is a lot of evidence of torture of the captured servicemen, extrajudicial killings,and cruel treatment of Armenian prisoners of war. The bodies of Armenian female servicemen were mutilated with particular cruelty, stripped, then videotaped by Azerbaijani servicemen and published on social networks.

The video footage of these atrocities shows piles of mutilated and beheaded Armenian soldiers, including servicewomen. In the video the Armenian servicewoman appears naked, with both arms and legs cut off. One of her eyes wasgoughed out and replaced with stones, her fingers were cut and shoved in her mouth. Azerbaijani soldiers marked the name of Azerbaijani special forces Yasma on her tortured body. The whole process of the video shooting is accompanied by laughter and jokes of Azerbaijani soldiers.

Dear colleagues,

Female servicemen were killed with horrific cruelty only because they were Armenians, not only because they were soldiers, but because they were women.

Later, we also had another terrifying video that was spread in social networks. Azerbaijani soldiers shoot a group of Armenian prisoners of war in the sovereign territory of Armenia.

Suchatrocities are the result of the consistent state policy of Armenophobia in Azerbaijan, which is carried out on the state level, manifested in all spheres of public life.

In this regard I would like to emphasize the important role of the international community aimed at preventing such kind of war crimes through taking appropriate measures to stop Azerbaijan’s aggression, ” the MP said.